I have tried every suggestion I could find for enabling and fixing hibernation, none of them work. When I try sudo pm-hibernate I get a blank screen for 2 seconds and then right back to my workspace/desktop.

I have also tried disabling networking as well to ensure that the hardware wasn't interfering with the hibernate. I even went a step further and removed the wireless card from my laptop internally to test. Still the same results.

Looking for valid answers/list of distributions that actually HIBERNATE out of the box or a definitive 100% working answer to getting Linux Mint 17 to hibernate.

hibernation requires your system makes use of swap, and that swap is bigger than the RAM
MemTotal: 12187188 kB
SwapTotal: 0 kB
hibernation will never work unless your system uses the swap partition. also check that it is big enough. a little bigger does no harm.

once you fulfill these requirements, forget about changing desktops which is a loss of time. use the hibernate command (install it if needed, use one of the alternate commands otherwise) in order to debug stuff properly.

you also need to describe what happens when you try to hibernate : nothing, shutdown ... if you still experience problems

... if that is actually the problem, you'll need to add the swap partition to your fstab. a sample line should exist in the file and be commented out. if not, the type is "swap" and the mountpoint can be set to anything. usually people write "swap" or "_" as the mountpoint.